Splitsville, U.S.A.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus finds the fun in divorce.

The character that Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays in her new show, “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” on CBS on Monday nights, will remind viewers of Elaine Benes, the character she played on “Seinfeld.” That’s a good thing for everyone. Among the most engaging sitcom characters are the ones who are both inherently annoying and constantly being put in circumstances that force them to become still more annoying, even though they’re often the aggrieved parties. Ralph Kramden, Murphy Brown, the character played by Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the foursomes of “Seinfeld” and “Will & Grace,” Michael Scott, the bad boss played by Steve Carell in “The Office,” based on the character that Ricky Gervais created in the immortal original—they all dig holes for themselves that they have a practically impossible time getting out of. Christine isn’t as selfish or as defensive as Elaine was, though there are funny moments when she comes close—and in the bargain makes you almost forget her awful post-“Seinfeld” comedy, “Watching Ellie,” which came and went a few years ago. The new title, though, is as uncatchy as the old one; in addition to not having any kind of ring to it, “The New Adventures of Old Christine” has the bugaboo word “old” in it, not to mention the fact that it calls up the Stephen King opus “Christine,” whose title character was an automobile. But don’t worry: this show is not an update of “My Mother the Car.”

It’s also not the best comedy around, by any means, but it may be good enough to put an end to the infamous “ ‘Seinfeld’ curse”: this could be the first show that a former “Seinfeld” cast member has done that will turn out to be anything more than a bad memory, both for the actor and for the viewers. Kari Lizer, a TV actress turned TV writer, created “Christine” with the idea of depicting a woman who has a “good divorce.” Christine and her ex-husband, Richard (Clark Gregg), who have an eight-year-old son named Ritchie (shades of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Happy Days”), have been split up for two years, and she declares to her brother, “My divorce is better than most people’s marriages.” And so it seems to be; Christine and Richard are affectionate with each other in a way that you rarely see among married sitcom couples. The first episode has Christine dropping Ritchie off on his first day at a new, private school, where she’s accosted by two hypercompetitive mothers—perfect, slim, headband-wearing killer mothers, who are always seen together. They’re a walking twinset. (Alex Kapp Horner and Tricia O’Kelley, who play the sock-her moms, are very good at putting small but noticeable tweaks in what are essentially clichéd roles. I hope these two turn up regularly.) They’re a great foil for Louis-Dreyfus; Christine is thrown off balance by their laserlike focus on the fact that she works—she owns a gym that specializes in thirty-minute workouts for busy women—and doesn’t have time to volunteer at the school. In her insecurity, she responds defensively—when the mothers tell her that they just saw her husband’s girlfriend in the parking lot, she acts as if she knew all about her. Once she’s out of their sight, she races out the school door, going so fast that she has trouble taking a corner and has to stick out one arm and whirl it around to get herself back on course. It’s a brief, hilarious bit of physical comedy, followed instantly by another one, when her momentum causes her to almost trip again. Any number of performers could do pretty well in a scene like this; Louis-Dreyfus, as anyone who saw Elaine dance in “Seinfeld” will remember, makes such scenes excruciating miniature masterpieces of humiliation.

She’s “old” Christine because, it turns out, Richard’s new girlfriend is also named Christine (Emily Rutherfurd). New Christine is younger and a little on the dim side, as wife-replacements usually are in sitcoms. “Out of Practice” may be the most extreme current example of this TV truism; in that show, Henry Winkler replaces his wife, played by Stockard Channing, with the inflatable doll known as Jennifer Tilly. There is something of the “good divorce” in that show, too, though, as there is in the WB’s “Reba.” In sitcoms with this setup, if not in real life, it’s generally the first wife who wins the battle of words—she gets custody of the zingers. But the one who always gets the sex is the ex-husband, it seems; in the second episode, Richard, noting that they’ve been apart for two years, says that that means Christine hasn’t had sex in a little more than three years. Their divorce was mutual—each had lost interest in sleeping with the other—and yet here, as always in sitcom land, the scarlet “L,” for “loser,” lands right on the ex-wife’s bosom. The entire second episode is about Christine getting one “under her belt,” but feeling inadequate; believe it or not, she utters the lines “I used to be turned on by the touch of a man. Now I’m turned on by a sale at Target. If I can just get a guy to touch me at Target, I’m gold.” It’s a lame line, pulled from some old pile of sitcom dialogue. Christine is attractive, and yet all the sexual jokes are on her. “I have to stand on my head to make my boobs look good,” she says. The line underscores the anxiety that women really do feel about their bodies as they get older, but in this case it’s just bad-faith writing, because there is no specific truth to it, and, in fact, in outfit after outfit Louis-Dreyfus shows off her boobage as if it had just won a blue ribbon at the state fair. It’s disheartening to see the show fall so lazily into sitcom conventions, such as the scene where Christine goes on a blind date that’s been arranged by one of her best friends. Not only is the guy extremely unattractive, he’s phobic about food: he brings his own dinner to the restaurant. The friend who set them up is played by Wanda Sykes, and you don’t for a second believe that she would think of pairing Christine with this doofus.

A sitcom doesn’t have to break new ground to be good, but it does have to make you feel that it isn’t just going through the motions. “Christine” satisfies on that score to some extent, but you just want more from it. (And less—a lot less, for instance, of Hamish Linklater, who plays Christine’s live-in slacker brother, a do-nothing drone who shuffles around in his bathrobe delivering very dead deadpan lines, and Trevor Gagnon, the oddly affectless child actor who plays Ritchie.) Some of the moments are priceless: the look on Christine’s face after she sleeps with a guy (played by Andy Richter) she picked up at the grocery store, for example, and the look on her face later in the same episode, after she sleeps with him a second time, owing to a lapse in her better judgment. If there were more attention to details like this—even the subtly off-kilter angle at which Louis-Dreyfus holds her head in the second shot is telling—and less knee-jerk predictability, the series would have almost as much charm as its star does.

Listen carefully, because I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to deny that I ever said it: Let’s hear it for network executives! It was Lloyd Braun who came up with the idea for “Lost,” when he was the head of ABC’s entertainment division, and it was Stephen McPherson, the current holder of that job, who suggested to Fred Goss and Nick Holly that they alter a pitch they’d made to him for an improvisational show about three families to one about a single, extended family. The result is the compelling, if not quite riveting, “Sons & Daughters,” a laugh-trackless, partly improvisational comedy shown on Tuesday nights on ABC.

Goss plays Cameron Walker, a forty-something Ohioan with a complicated family life. There are a dozen regulars in the cast, and it’s hard to keep track of everyone’s connection with everyone else: there are full siblings, half siblings, stepparents, nieces, nephews, a great-aunt, a second wife, the father of a half sister’s child, and probably a couple of goldfish floating around somewhere. It sounds wacky, but it’s really like a lot of families, right down to the little girl who wears a pink tutu all the time. The cast, which includes Dee Wallace and Max Gail, as Cameron’s parents, and Greg Pitts, who, unforgettably, played the guy who made the lewd “Oh face” in the movie “Office Space,” is uniformly wonderful. More than ten hours of tape is shot for each episode, and somehow Holly and Goss shape the weekly footage into a coherent half hour. In the absence of a laugh track, you can clearly hear and feel the vexations and pain behind the humor. When Cameron’s sister Sharon (Alison Quinn), who is depressed about her sexless marriage, says, “I’m pretty in Cincinnati. I’m not pretty in a general sense,” the joke isn’t merely situational—it’s existential. ♦